Au cours des deux dernières semaines, certains médias français ont amplifié des récits dépeignant Elon Musk comme vaincu au tribunal contre OpenAI, embourbé dans des enquêtes judiciaires sur X, et « furieux » face aux choix de casting à Hollywood. Ces narratifs le présentent comme erratique ou problématique. Pourtant, un examen plus attentif révèle un schéma d’outrage sélectif contre l’un des bâtisseurs les plus ambitieux de l’humanité, tandis que ses entreprises réalisent des avancées historiques.
Le Procès OpenAI : Une Position Philosophique, Pas une Défaite
Elon a cofondé OpenAI avec une mission claire : une IA sûre et ouverte pour le bénéfice de l’humanité. Il a alerté tôt sur les dérives vers le profit et les systèmes fermés. Bien que la récente décision du jury soit décevante, elle n’efface pas la validité de ses préoccupations, surtout alors qu’OpenAI se précipite vers une IPO à but lucratif avec le soutien massif de Microsoft. Le procès d’Elon a mis en lumière de vraies questions de gouvernance. Elon a déjà annoncé qu’il ferait appel de la décision devant la Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals en Californie. (Les vrais visionnaires défient les intérêts puissants ; l’histoire leur donne souvent raison.)
L’Enquête Française sur X : Liberté d’Expression contre Application Sélective
L’enquête française sur X concernant la modération de contenus, avec menaces de mandats d’arrêt, cible Elon pour avoir ouvert la plateforme à des voix diverses. Elon s’est défendu publiquement contre ce qu’il perçoit comme un acharnement politique.
Les critiques ignorent commodément que, avant Elon Musk, Twitter prenait de l’argent et du soutien gouvernemental de la part des gouvernements en échange de la permission de la censure. En fait, c’était vraiment de la censure sournoise. Des documents internes des Twitter Files montrent que le FBI a versé plus de 3,4 millions de dollars à l’ancien Twitter (entre 2019 et début 2021) pour le temps passé par son équipe Safety, Content & Law Enforcement à traiter les demandes des forces de l’ordre liées à la modération de contenus. Voir les révélations documentées ici.
Elon a délibérément rompu avec ce modèle le jour où il a acquis l’entreprise en octobre 2022. Il a immédiatement mis fin à tous ces arrangements de remboursement gouvernementaux, démantelé les équipes dédiées SCALE de modération qui traitaient les paiements, et éliminé complètement la pratique. X fonctionne désormais avec une dépendance nulle à tout financement gouvernemental lié à la modération de contenus. La plateforme publie des rapports de transparence annuels détaillés montrant exactement comment elle gère les demandes des forces de l’ordre tout en priorisant une transparence maximale et la quête de vérité plutôt que la censure.
Polémiques Culturelles et Titres Outrés
Les rapports sur les critiques d’Elon concernant le casting dans L’Odyssée de Christopher Nolan ont été présentés comme « haineux ». Elon s’oppose depuis longtemps aux quotas DEI forcés qui privilégient l’identité au mérite et à l’intégrité narrative. Questionner les choix artistiques défend l’excellence dans le storytelling. L’indignation des médias français contraste vivement avec les éloges pour les exploits d’ingénierie d’Elon.
La Vraie Histoire : Un Progrès Inarrêtable
Pendant que les critiques de salon se concentrent sur les procès et les tweets, les entreprises d’Elon livrent des résultats :
SpaceX prépare une introduction en bourse historique, avec des valorisations vers les trillions et des timelines ambitieuses pour Mars. Des médias français comme Le Monde et Les Echos saluent à juste titre son caractère spectaculaire.
Le récent test de vol intégré de Starship Version 3 (IFT-12) a validé des avancées critiques dans l’architecture de propulsion Raptor 3, incluant des variantes à plus forte poussée au niveau de la mer et en version vide, un volume accru des réservoirs de propergol et des systèmes de contrôle de réaction améliorés, tout en démontrant un hot-staging nominal, le déploiement d’un satellite factice en orbite et une rentrée contrôlée de précision avec amerrissage. Ces résultats marquent un progrès décisif vers la réutilisabilité complète et rapide du système de lancement super-lourd de 18 millions de livres de poussée et les capacités de transfert de propergol en orbite nécessaires aux architectures durables lunaires et martiennes. La direction de la NASA et les principaux experts aérospatiaux ont publiquement salué les données de vol itératives et la maturation du système.
Tesla continue de renforcer sa position à la fois dans les véhicules électriques et dans le stockage d’énergie à l’échelle du réseau en France. L’entreprise déploie des systèmes de stockage par batterie Megapack à grande échelle, notamment le projet de 240 MW / 480 MWh à Cernay-lès-Reims avec TagEnergy et le projet de 100 MW / 200 MWh à Cheviré près de Nantes. Ces installations exploitent la plateforme de gestion énergétique Autobidder de Tesla pour l’optimisation du réseau en temps réel et la régulation de fréquence. Parallèlement, Tesla a atteint un jalon mondial avec l’activation de son 80 000e stall Supercharger sur une station V4 étendue majeure en France, dotée de canopées solaires et d’une architecture de charge haute puissance.
Elon Musk portant son célèbre t-shirt « Nuke Mars » observe le test de vol intégré réussi de Starship Version 3 (IFT-12) aux côtés des membres de l’équipe SpaceX, dont Jared en contrôle de mission.
Il emploie des dizaines de milliers de personnes, a payé les impôts les plus élevés de l’histoire des États-Unis — plus de 11 milliards de dollars en une seule année — et SpaceX a effectué 165 lancements en 2025 seulement, acheminant plusieurs équipages de quatre astronautes chacun vers l’ISS via Dragon, tandis que la Chine n’en a envoyé aucun vers l’ISS et que la Russie n’en a acheminé qu’une poignée via Soyuz au cours des 24 derniers mois.
En fin de compte, les récits amplifiés par certains médias français au cours des deux dernières semaines continuent de dépeindre Elon Musk comme erratique ou problématique.
Pourtant, un examen plus attentif révèle un schéma d’outrage sélectif contre l’un des bâtisseurs les plus ambitieux de l’humanité, tandis que ses entreprises réalisent des avancées historiques.
In the past two weeks, certain French outlets have amplified stories portraying Elon Musk as defeated in court against OpenAI, entangled in judicial probes over X, and “enraged” over Hollywood casting choices. These narratives paint him as erratic or problematic.
Yet a closer look reveals a pattern of selective outrage against one of humanity’s most ambitious builders, while his companies achieve historic breakthroughs.
The OpenAI Lawsuit: A Philosophical Stand, Not a Defeat
Elon co-founded OpenAI with a clear mission: safe, open AI for humanity’s benefit. He warned early about profit-driven shifts and closed systems. Although the recent jury decision is disappointing, it does not erase the validity of his concerns, especially as OpenAI races toward a for-profit IPO with massive Microsoft backing. Elon’s suit highlighted real governance questions.
Elon has already announced he will appeal the ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California. (True visionaries challenge powerful interests; history often vindicates them.)
French Investigation into X: Free Speech vs. Selective Enforcement
France’s probe into X over content moderation, with threats of warrants, targets Elon for platforming diverse voices. Elon has publicly defended against what he sees as politically motivated overreach.
Critics conveniently ignore that before Elon Musk, Twitter was taking some government money and support from governments in return for allowing censorship. In fact, it really was underhanded censorship. Internal documents from the Twitter Files show the FBI paid pre-Musk Twitter over $3.4 million (between 2019 and early 2021) for staff time processing law-enforcement and content-moderation requests through its Safety, Content & Law Enforcement division. See the documented revelations here.
Elon deliberately broke from this model the day he acquired the company in October 2022. He immediately ended all such government reimbursement arrangements, dismantled the dedicated SCALE moderation teams that had processed the payments, and eliminated the practice entirely. X now operates with zero reliance on any government funding tied to content moderation. The platform publishes detailed annual Transparency Reports showing exactly how it handles law-enforcement requests while prioritizing maximum transparency and truth-seeking over censorship.
Cultural Spats and “Outrage” Headlines
Reports of Elon criticizing casting in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey were framed as “hateful.” Elon has long opposed forced DEI quotas that prioritize identity over merit and storytelling integrity. Questioning artistic choices defends excellence in storytelling.
French media’s pearl-clutching contrasts sharply with praise for Elon’s engineering feats.
The Real Story: Unstoppable Progress
While armchair critics focus on lawsuits and tweets, Elon’s companies deliver:
SpaceX is preparing a landmark IPO, with valuations soaring toward trillions and ambitious Mars timelines. French outlets like Le Monde and Les Echos rightly call it spectacular.
The recent integrated flight test of Starship Version 3 (IFT-12) has validated critical advancements in the Raptor 3 propulsion architecture including higher-thrust sea-level and vacuum variants, increased propellant tank volume, and improved reaction-control systems while demonstrating nominal hot-staging, orbital dummy-satellite deployment, and a precision controlled re-entry splashdown. These results mark decisive progress toward rapid full reusability of the 18-million-pound-thrust super-heavy lift system and the in-orbit propellant-transfer capabilities required for sustainable lunar and Martian architectures. NASA leadership and leading aerospace experts have publicly commended the iterative flight data and system maturation.
Tesla continues to strengthen its position in both electric vehicles and grid-scale energy storage in France. The company is deploying large-scale Megapack battery energy storage systems including the 240 MW / 480 MWh project in Cernay-lès-Reims with TagEnergy and the 100 MW / 200 MWh Cheviré project near Nantes. These installations leverage Tesla’s Autobidder energy management platform for real-time grid optimization and frequency regulation. In parallel, Tesla achieved a global milestone with the activation of its 80,000th Supercharger stall at a major expanded V4 station in France featuring solar canopies and high-power charging architecture.
Elon Musk in his iconic “Nuke Mars” t-shirt watches the successful Starship Version 3 (IFT-12) integrated flight test alongside SpaceX team members including Jared from mission control.
He employs tens of thousands, has paid the highest taxes of anyone in the history of the US — over $11 billion in a single year — and SpaceX has conducted 165 launches in 2025 alone, bringing multiple crews of four astronauts each to the ISS via Dragon, while China has brought up none to the ISS and Russia has brought up only a handful via Soyuz in the past 24 months.
Ultimately, the stories amplified by certain French outlets over the past two weeks continue to portray Elon Musk as erratic or problematic.
Yet a closer look reveals a pattern of selective outrage against one of humanity’s most ambitious builders, while his companies achieve historic breakthroughs.
In the quiet streets of Southampton on a cold December night in 2025, 18-year-old Henry Nowak did what thousands of university students do after a night out with friends: he walked home, phone in hand, sending Snapchat videos to his mates, still buzzing from football and camaraderie. What happened next was not just a senseless murder. It was a cascade of failures—by an attacker wielding ideology as a shield, by police whose priorities appeared warped by fear of “racism” accusations, and by a broader system that has normalized two-tier justice. Seven months later, as Vickrum Digwa, 23, stands trial for murder at Southampton Crown Court, the world is only now learning Henry’s name. And it is learning it primarily because Elon Musk’s X platform refused to let the story die in obscurity.
This is the story of a young man whose future was stolen, a family shattered, and a nation forced to confront whether some lives matter more than others in the eyes of the law.
This is the story of a young man whose future was stolen, a family shattered, and a nation forced to confront whether some lives matter more than others in the eyes of the law.
A Son, Brother, Teammate, and Role Model Full of Promise
Henry Nowak grew up in Chafford Hundred, Essex, in a close-knit family that watched him thrive. He attended Harris Academy Chafford Hundred, where staff remembered him as a role model to younger students who made a significant contribution and left with an excellent set of A-level results. At the University of Southampton, he was in his first year studying Accountancy and Finance. He played football for two teams—Villarrealgorithm CF and the university side—worked part-time at Morrisons, and was already building new friendships while keeping old ones close.
His family—father Mark Nowak, mother Lucy Ross, siblings, cousins, grandparents, and teammates—described him as “a loving son, brother, cousin, grandson, nephew, friend and teammate… full of life, kindness and ambition.” A charity football match held in his memory raised more than £40,000 for 2Wish, the bereavement support organization that helped the family in their darkest days. Mark later spoke of the “very very big hole” left in their lives, especially as they faced what would have been Henry’s 19th birthday. Memorial walls and memory books at his old school overflowed with tributes from friends and teachers who called him funny, kind, talented, and the sort of lad who lifted the mood the moment he walked into a room.
Henry’s future should have been ordinary and bright: a career in finance, weekends on the pitch, family holidays, perhaps one day coaching his own kids. Instead, it ended in a puddle of blood on Belmont Road.
The Night of December 3, 2025: A Racist Accusation, a Knife, and a Victim Ignored
Henry had been out celebrating the end of the first semester with his university football teammates. He was under the legal drink-drive limit and in good spirits when he began walking home along Belmont Road, sending those Snapchat videos. Court evidence shows the moment his phone captured Vickrum Digwa approaching, openly carrying a 21cm shastar—a large Sikh ceremonial blade—in a sheath over his clothing. Henry, spotting the weapon, jokingly called him a “bad man.” Digwa replied, “I am a bad man.” Moments later, Digwa pursued him and inflicted four stab wounds, including a fatal 8cm-deep puncture to the chest that nicked the subclavian vein and flooded Henry’s chest cavity with over a litre of blood.
When police arrived, Digwa told them Henry had “racially abused” him. Officers handcuffed the bleeding teenager. Bodycam footage played in court captured Henry protesting he had done no such thing, begging for help, saying he couldn’t breathe. They told him they didn’t think he had been stabbed. First aid began only after he collapsed. He choked on his own blood and was pronounced dead 37 minutes later. Digwa denies murder, claiming self-defence and fear over his own kirpan. His mother, Kiran Kaur, denies assisting an offender by allegedly removing the weapon.
The senselessness is staggering. A young man running for his life, stabbed while fleeing, then treated as the aggressor because the real aggressor invoked the ultimate modern taboo: racism. Henry was white; Digwa is Sikh. The accusation flipped victim and perpetrator in the eyes of officers arriving at a chaotic scene. No urgency. No humanity. Just ideological caution that, in this case, proved fatal.
The Police Failure: Why Aid Was Delayed and a Victim Suffered
The officers’ actions were not born of malice but of a culture drilled into UK policing: accusations of racism trigger instant deference, even when the accuser is the one with the knife. Bodycam evidence and trial testimony paint a picture of hesitation rooted in fear of career-ending complaints. Henry begged for help. They prioritized securing the “racist” suspect—him—over treating obvious stab wounds. Months later, as of May 2026, no officers have been named publicly, suspended, or disciplined. An independent investigation by the IOPC is ongoing, but accountability feels glacial.
This is two-tier policing in stark relief: the same forces that arrest thousands for “offensive” social media posts move with glacial slowness when their own decisions contribute to a death.
Elon Musk, X, and the Exposure That Mainstream Media Nearly Buried
None of this would have reached global attention without X. Under Elon Musk’s ownership, the platform became the town square where citizen journalists, eyewitness accounts, and unfiltered video could spread. Musk quoted a detailed thread laying out the horror—Henry running for his life, handcuffed while bleeding out, no urgency from police—and added his own searing analysis: “There were massive international protests over George Floyd and those police involved were severely punished with long prison sentences, yet the police responsible here did not even lose their jobs! An incredibly unjust double-standard!”
Elon’s engagement was and is not performative. He highlighted the core facts: the attacker’s racism claim, the handcuffs, the choking death, the contrast with 12,000+ arrests for tweets. He amplified the pain without exaggeration. In doing so, he forced a conversation that legacy media had sidelined. Without X’s free-speech ethos post-Musk acquisition, Henry’s story might have remained a local court report, buried under other headlines. Musk even offered to fund a wrongful-death lawsuit against the officers.
George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, and the Mirror No One Wants to Face
Contrast is unavoidable. George Floyd’s death in May 2020 sparked global protests, riots in U.S. cities, corporate virtue-signaling, and policy upheavals. Officers faced long prison sentences; Derek Chauvin received 22.5 years. “Black Lives Matter” became a worldwide rallying cry, with politicians kneeling in solidarity.
Henry Nowak received none of that. No mass vigils in Trafalgar Square. No world leaders issuing statements. No golden-casket funerals broadcast worldwide. Just silence from the same quarters that once demanded “no justice, no peace.” The double standard is glaring. One death fit a dominant narrative of systemic racism against minorities; the other challenged it—white victim, minority attacker, police prioritizing the racism claim. All lives should matter equally, yet institutional and media responses reveal selective empathy. This is not “whataboutism.” It is a demand for consistency: if police failings demand protests when the victim is Black, they demand the same when the victim is white.
Will This Spark a “White Lives Matter” Movement? Or Something Better?
The question hangs heavy: could Henry’s death birth a “White Lives Matter” movement? Unlikely in the organized, protest-heavy form of BLM. “White Lives Matter” has existed as a fringe counter-slogan, often dismissed or demonized. But something deeper may be stirring. Across Britain and beyond, frustration with two-tier policing—harsher on native citizens’ speech than on migrant crime or ideological favoritism—has been building for years. This case crystallizes it: an innocent 18-year-old died in custody of the state’s hesitation.
Public reaction on X and elsewhere shows raw pain, calls for reform, and demands for color-blind justice. It may not spawn marches in Henry’s name, but it could accelerate a broader reckoning: equal protection under the law, not equal deference to accusations based on race. True progress lies not in mirroring BLM’s excesses but in insisting every life—Henry’s included—receives the same urgency, investigation, and outrage.
A Turning Point in History?
Henry Nowak’s death may prove a quiet pivot. In an era of mass migration, knife crime epidemics, and identity politics overriding evidence, it exposes the human cost of prioritizing narrative over truth. A loving family lost their son just before Christmas. A university lost a promising student. A football pitch lost a teammate. Britain lost another young man to a blade and a system that looked away.
The trial will deliver legal justice for the stabbing. But the deeper questions—police accountability, media silence, institutional bias—remain. Thanks to X and voices like Musk’s, Henry will not be forgotten. His name now echoes globally. His story demands we choose: selective outrage that divides us further, or a commitment that every life, regardless of the victim’s skin color or the attacker’s, matters equally.
Rest in peace, Henry. Your bright future was stolen, but your legacy may yet force the change Britain desperately needs. Justice for Henry Nowak is justice for us all.
May 18, 2026 — Elon Musk made a surprise remote appearance at the 9th International Samson Smart Mobility Summit in Israel. Despite it being 2:30 AM in Austin, he joined the stage virtually and delivered thoughtful answers on Full Self-Driving, robotaxis, Optimus, Starship, Neuralink, and humanity’s path toward universal high income and abundance.
Here is my full verbatim transcript (carefully stitched from @CBDoge, Sawyer Merritt, and the video itself):
Host (Daniela Geromar-Galiot): We’re absolutely thrilled to have you joining us here today at the 9th International Samson Smart Mobility Summit in Israel, a country that shares your spirit of relentless innovation.
Elon Musk: Thank you for having me. I would be there in person, but we gotta get this SpaceX IPO going pretty soon. So I’m happy to answer any questions you may have or whatever would be interesting.
Host: Perfect. So Tesla has spent years developing the vision and technology for smart mobility. Now that you’re moving from testing, what is the biggest challenge in scaling this technology to millions of users around the world?
Elon Musk: In terms of having self-driving be ubiquitous… I think we’re making steady progress. The Tesla Full Self-Driving software, which is really just AI and cameras, we don’t use radars or LIDAR or anything like that. It’s really trying to drive the car in the same way that a human drives the car, which humans primarily drive the car with vision and with a biological neural net. We take the same approach with our vehicles, which is a digital neural net and cameras. I expect this approach to ultimately be at least an order of magnitude safer than humans driving.
I’m not sure if we have approval for this in Israel. I think we may have, or we will get it soon hopefully and you’ll be able to experience it for yourself.
It is quite magical, because the car feels like it is sentient. It actually feels like it’s alive. And you can actually, as we improve the software, you can feel the sentience growing in the car. It feels alive.
And I think we already have some vehicles operating with no people inside and no safety monitors in three cities in Texas, and probably will be widespread in the U.S. by end of this year, and hopefully in Israel too.
Host: Thank you. We look forward to that.
Elon Musk: The world is going to have a lot of robots in the future, and what Tesla makes is effectively four-wheeled robots right now.
And in the future we’ll also be having humanoid robots. You’re seeing a lot of startups with humanoid robots. My prediction is that there’ll be far more robots, like intelligent robots, in the world than there will be people, and I think this is most likely to be a good thing. We always want to be a little paranoid, or certainly not complacent about the safety of robots, but I think it will usher in an age of not universal basic income, but universal high income.
Host: Right, thank you… And I think we have one of your robots out here in the exhibition, so that’s also a lot of fun for everybody here. Go and take a look.
Elon Musk: Optimus subprime, haha!
Host: Exactly. When you think about, let’s say, the most exciting development or breakthrough that you’re working on right now, what do you think would be the one that people aren’t talking enough about enough?
Elon Musk: Well, I guess people are mostly aware of the rockets that SpaceX does. This Starship rocket, which we are now in version 3 of, will, I think, achieve full and rapid reusability. This is the fundamental breakthrough necessary to make life multi-planetary, to extend consciousness beyond Earth, and have self-sustaining cities, self-growing cities on the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere in the solar system.
This is really quite a profound breakthrough, and we might succeed in doing that this year. The critical factor being full and rapid reuse of all parts of the rocket. That’s a much bigger deal than people would realize. When that technology is developed, that’ll be a fork in the road in human history, where we can become a spacefaring civilization, a multi-planet species, and I think that’s an incredibly exciting thing.
Elon Musk: Perhaps to some degree there is also, not many people are aware of Neuralink, which is creating a cybernetic interface to AI from your brain.
It has enabled people who have completely lost their brain-body connection to speak again and to use their computer and their phone and we believe it will enable people to walk again… because you can take the signals from the brain, from the motor cortex and if somebody has, say, a severe spinal injury, you could transmit those signals to a second neural implant and reanimate the body so that people can use their limbs. We think at some point they can live a normal life by effectively bridging the signal from the brain to past the point in the spine where damage has occurred.
These are pretty wild things that are possible. And then later this year we expect to do our first implant for what we call “blindsight,” where even if somebody has lost both eyes or lost the optic nerve or perhaps has never seen, even if they were blind at birth, it will give them initially limited vision, but I think over time very precise vision, perhaps superhuman.
So restoring control of people who are tetraplegics and restoring sight are pretty big deals. Those sort of Jesus-level technologies, you know… miracles. Yes, exactly. Miracles of science
Host: . Miracles! Yeah. Great, thank you!
Host: I have another question about the automotive world. If I bring it back to smart mobility. When you look past the immediate rollouts of FSD, what does the ultimate endgame for smart mobility look like in 10 or 20 years from now? I mean, what is the grand vision that still keeps you up at night when we talk about mobility?
Elon Musk: Well, at this point the path to cars driving is an order of magnitude safer than humans is very clear, and I think it’s not really a question mark. So I’m not sure if this really keeps me up at night because the path is just so obviously there.
Five years from now, or certainly ten years from now, probably 90% of all distance driven will be driven by the AI in a self-driving car. It will be quite a niche thing in 10 years to actually be driving your own car, because the car will drive you.
I think there will also be humanoid robots that are pretty much everywhere. And I think it would be pretty cool because who wouldn’t want their own personal C-3PO, R2-D2 — but even better than that! And I think everyone is going to want one, maybe two.
Host: A terminator?
Elon Musk: Well, hopefully not. We should always be concerned about such a thing because yeah, Terminator is one of the possible outcomes. I think it’s an unlikely one, but it’s not impossible. And so we should always be careful to make sure that robots are safe.
This is why I actually think we’re headed to a future of amazing abundance. You can think of the output of the economy as productivity per capita times the population. And if the robots are extremely productive, and there are a lot of them, you’re effectively going to have an economy that will be maybe 10 or even 100 times bigger than what it is today. And that’s why I think it is going to be a future of universal high income, where pretty much anyone can have whatever they want.
There are larger questions of meaning. How do we derive meaning in a world where AI and robots can do anything better than what we can do? Because that is probably where we’re headed. But I think people will still find ways to have meaning.
And sometimes it’s like, what is the future that you want? Or what do you think the future is? What’s the best picture you can possibly imagine? And a lot of people are a little surprised by that question. Because, let’s say you are praying to God and you ask for a given future. Well, what future do you want God to give you?
Probably a future where there is an amazing abundance for all, where everybody has incredible medical care and in fact anything can be cured. No one is hungry. People are free to do what they would like. I think that’s probably the best future.
Host: And peace, peace and love!
Elon Musk: Well yeah. I always worry about it becomes some dystopian version of that, you know. But certainly love — I mean, I think we want a future with that seems like a no-brainer. Peace is an interesting one because sometimes the price for complete peace may be maybe too high, because complete peace may require too much suppression of the people. So perhaps there is peace to some degree but not completely. Ideally there’s not like a large-scale war of course. But you know, you have to think about these questions kind of deeply. Do you want a world where there’s no conflict? But how do you achieve a world where there is no conflict at all without some form of suppression?
So my guess is probably people would want a future with some conflict, not total peace, but nothing… not a serious war perhaps. But these are interesting philosophical questions. What future would you like?
Host: Do you have a message to the Israeli innovators here?
Elon Musk: Honestly, I’m a huge admirer of the innovation coming out of Israel. I think it is objectively true that Israel punches far above its weight for population. I think, probably number one My hat is off to Israel for how much incredible innovation per capita. Israel must be number one by far in the world!
Host: Thank you so much. Before you go, I would like to invite Israel’s Minister of Transport and Road Safety, Brigadier General Miri Regev, to join our conversation…
Minister Miri Regev: Thank you Elon, you are great! We love you! I see that you are tired! it’s wonderful to have you with us even remotely.
Elon Musk: Thank you. It’s about 2:30 in the morning here in Austin, Texas, and thank you for having me! It was a pleasure, thank you! so I’m going to get some sleep, I really appreciate the invitation and looking forward to seeing progress in Israel.
Host & Minister: Thank you Elon! (Audience applause)
Host (wrap-up): That was Elon Musk joining us remotely from Austin…
Key Takeaways
Full Self-Driving & Robotaxis
Vision-only FSD (no radar or LIDAR) already feels “sentient” and is running unsupervised in Texas cities. I have taken many unsupervised Model Y Robotaxi here in my city of Austin, Texas.
Widespread U.S. robotaxi deployment expected by end of 2026, with Israel to follow soon after.
In 10 years, ~90% of all miles driven will be by AI — personally driving your own car will become a niche activity.
Robots & Abundance
Far more intelligent robots than humans expected in the future.
Tesla’s current cars are “four-wheeled robots”; Optimus humanoid robots are coming next.
Shift from Universal Basic Income → Universal High Income as robots drive massive economic growth (10x–100x bigger economy).
Starship & Multi-Planetary Life
Starship Version 3 targeting full & rapid reusability this year.
Critical step toward self-sustaining cities on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. we are at a “fork in the road in human history.”
Neuralink & Medical Miracles
Already restoring speech and device control for patients.
Upcoming “blindsight” trials later this year could restore (and eventually enhance) vision.
Described as “Jesus-level technologies.”
Praise for Israel
Elon called Israel #1 in the world for innovation per capita and said the country “punches far above its weight.”
Elon’s Standout Quotes
“It is quite magical, because the car feels like it is sentient. It actually feels like it’s alive.”
“We might succeed in doing that this year… That’ll be a fork in the road in human history.”
“Innovation per capita, Israel’s must be number one by far in the world.”
“10 years from now, probably 90% of all distance driven will be driven by the AI in a self-driving car.”
My Take
I’m in awe that Elon stayed up until the wee hours of the morning, 2:30 AM his time, to do this interview. I woke up to phone notifications form CB Doge and Sawyer Merritt sharing clips of the interview. Perhaps the biggest treat of the whole thing was a podcast episode that Elon also shared around the same time from Steven Mark Ryan. Please watch it (it is super short) and you’ll get the real picture of all the phenominal things Elon does!
• Chamath Shares Simple Formula To Elon Musk's Business Success • SpaceX Domination Continues (big AI implications) pic.twitter.com/vSmgOZOF4S
Format: Audio-only webcast (Q&A via Say Technologies platform)
Focus: Strategic outlook on AI, autonomy, Optimus, Robotaxi, and massive future investments (financial details covered separately in Tesla’s Q1 Update deck).
Tesla held its Q1 2026 Financial Results and Q&A webcast on April 22, 2026. As always, the call provided invaluable direct insight into the company’s direction straight from CEO Elon Musk, alongside other executives. These moments are especially precious—capturing Elon’s unfiltered thinking on the ambitious projects that define Tesla’s next chapter.
Participants
Travis Axelrod, Head of Investor Relations (moderator)
Elon Musk, Co-Founder & CEO
Vaibhav Taneja, CFO
A number of other Tesla executives (specific names beyond the above not individually detailed in the public audio/webcast notes)
The session began with opening remarks from Elon, followed by brief comments from Vaibhav, then moved into Q&A drawn from retail investor submissions (via Say) and the queue.
We continued to make meaningful progress on the build out of the infrastructure & AI software that underpins our Robotaxi & future robotics businesses in Q1.
Elon described 2026 as “a very exciting year” defined by substantially higher capital expenditures to fuel growth in AI, manufacturing, vehicles, and especially robotics. He reiterated his long-held conviction that Optimus will be Tesla’s (and the world’s) biggest product ever.
Key emphases included:
Heavy investment in core tech (battery, powertrain, AI software/training, chip design) and supply chain strengthening.
Cautious, safety-first expansion of unsupervised Full Self-Driving and Robotaxi operations (zero incidents/injuries to date).
The classic “stretched-out S-curve” reality for new production ramps (Cybercab, Semi, Optimus).
Major AI hardware progress (AI5 taped out, AI6 and Dojo 3 already in discussion).
Optimus production starting slowly in Fremont later this year (repurposing lines after S/X), with meaningful ramp in 2027; V3 design nearly ready for demonstration.
He stressed that all Tesla vehicles remain autonomy-ready and incredible value, while energy storage demand (Megapack) remains very strong.
Verbatim: Elon Musk’s Opening Remarks
“Thank you. I think we’ve got a very exciting year ahead of us with 2026. We’re going to be substantially increasing our investments in the future, so you should expect to see a very significant increase in capital expenditures. I think it’s well justified for a substantially increased future revenue stream. Obviously, Tesla is not alone in this. I think you’ve seen in most, if not all, certainly the major technology companies substantially increasing their capital investments. We’re going to be doing the same. I think it’s going to pay off in a very big way.
We’re investing in and improving our core technologies, battery powertrain, AI software, AI training, chip design, laying the groundwork for significantly increased manufacturing production. We are also strengthening our supply chain across the board, batteries, energy, AI, silicon, everything.
Laying the groundwork, like I said, for what we expect to be a significant increase in vehicle production in the future. Of course, a very significant increase. Well, actually releasing Optimus, but increasing our internal production for testing, and then probably being able to have Optimus be useful outside of Tesla sometime next year. As you’ve heard me say a few times, I think Optimus will be our biggest product, not just Tesla’s biggest product ever, but probably the biggest product ever. I remain convinced of that conclusion.
On our vehicle side, it’s always, I think, worth noting that a Tesla car is incredible value for money, and they’re all autonomy-ready, depending on what part of the world you’re in. The supervised Full Self-Driving is getting extremely good. We have just started production of Cybercab, and we’ll begin production of our Tesla Semi soon.
Now, I should say, whenever you have a new product with a completely new supply chain, new everything, it’s always a stretched-out S curve, so you should expect that initial production of Cybercab and Semi will be very slow, but then ramping up, and going exponential towards the end of the year and certainly next year. In fact, we’ll be ramping up production of all vehicles, in all factories, to the best of our ability through the balance of this year.
On the energy front, the United States and the whole world will need a lot of energy storage to meet growing electricity demand. Demand for our Megapack is very strong. We’re excited to begin production of Megapack 3 later this year in our new world-class factory outside Houston.
For Full Self-Driving and Robotaxi, version 14.3 was a major architectural update, and we have a whole pipeline of major improvements to Full Self-Driving that we believe will lead to unsupervised Full Self-Driving being available anywhere in the world that it is legal to do so. Then there’s a version 15, hopefully by the end of this year, but certainly by early next year. That will be a complete overhaul of the software architecture, and will run on AI5. At that point, we’re really just increasing the safety level of FSD above human safety level even more, meaning I think even within version 14, we’re significantly safer than human, but V15 will take that to another level. We’ve expanded Robotaxi to Dallas and Houston, using the same software source in the Bay Area.
The limiting factor for expansion is really rigorous validation, making sure things are completely safe. We don’t want to have a single accidental injury with the expansion of Robotaxi, and we have, to the credit of the team, not had a single one to date.
Optimus, we’re preparing Fremont for start of production later this year with Optimus. Again, totally new supply chain, totally new technology, so therefore, the production S curve is always very slow in the beginning. We’ll ramp up to significant numbers next year, and we’re constructing a second Optimus factory at our Giga Texas location, and that will probably start production around summer next year. The V3 Optimus design is almost ready to demonstrate. I think we want to just make sure it’s polished. Like it works functionally, but there’s some aesthetic elements that need to be finalized, and I think probably middle of this year, we should be able to show it off. We’re also a little hesitant to show V3 off because we find our competitors do a frame-by-frame analysis whenever we release something and copy everything they possibly can. I think there’s some value to not showing new technology until it’s close to production.
Congratulations again to the Tesla AI chip team for taping out AI5. That’s going to be a great chip. I think probably the best AI inference chip for edge compute that exists. Certainly, I think unequivocally the best value for money. Team did a great job, and we already have a lot of momentum for designing AI6, and we’ve begun to discuss ideas for Dojo 3. This is all very exciting.
We’ve also finalized plans for the research chip fab on the Giga Texas campus, and we’ll start construction of that this year.
In conclusion, Tesla is working on a lot of large, ambitious projects. They’re all very challenging, but I think they’re going to be revolutionary. This is what the team does best, solve the hardest problems and build amazing products. I’d like to thank the Tesla team for all their hard work and thank you to all of our supporters.”
Selected Verbatim Highlights from Elon’s Q&A Responses
Elon fielded questions on production realities, timelines, safety, and AI architecture. Here are key excerpts (lightly contextualized for flow):
On Optimus V3 reveal, production start (Fremont S/X line transition), and ramp challenges: “Well, as I was saying, what we’ve found is that when we’ve unveiled various Optimus versions, we’ve found out our competitors literally do a frame-by-frame analysis and copy everything we’re doing. I think we want to push the Optimus 3 unveil maybe closer to production. Start of production is, we’re assuming, somewhere around the late July, August timeframe. … Frankly, if we’re able to go from stopping production on one line, dismantling that entire line, reinstalling a whole new line, and turning that on in a matter of 4 months, that is an insanely fast speed. I don’t think any other company on Earth has ever done that before… It is impossible to predict these things. When you have a brand-new product and an entirely new production line, and you have 10,000 unique items, all of which have to go right to ramp production, it’ll move as fast as the least lucky, slowest, dumbest part in the entire 10,000… Initial skills will be, obviously, we’re going to start with simple skills in the factory and then build up from there.”
On unsupervised FSD/Robotaxi expansion and safety: “Well, we certainly hope to have unsupervised FSD or Robotaxi operating in, I don’t know, a dozen or so states by the end of this year. Initially, we’re taking a very cautious approach… [we haven’t had any injuries and certainly no fatalities to date with the unsupervised FSD and Robotaxi expansion, and we want to keep it that way].”
On Optimus AI architecture (local intelligence + orchestration): “Well, we think we can put a lot of intelligence locally in the robot and it certainly needs to be enough intelligence that if the robot gets disconnected, like if it’s a bad cellular signal or there isn’t Wi-Fi, you know, Optimus can’t just get stuck. It needs to have enough local intelligence that it can still do useful things, even if it loses the connection, kind of like the car. The car does not need any cellular or Wi-Fi connection to be able to drive safely. Now, I guess you can think of like Optimus needs kind of a manager to tell it what to do, broadly speaking… so you know i think you need kind of a an orchestration ai which uh you know grok would be good for orchestration um and and then for you know for optimist’s voice you know having um a low latency intelligent voice ai grok is actually very good for that… But I would expect the amount of interaction apart from like the voice stuff and asking complicated questions of the robot that necessarily needs a large AI model to answer the Gronk would probably have about as much interaction with Optimus as a manager would have with the people on their team.”
(Additional topics included HW3 upgrade paths for unsupervised capability, broader AI chip progress, and the new research chip fab at Giga Texas.)
Closing Thoughts
The call reinforced Tesla’s pivot toward AI, autonomy, and humanoid robotics as the dominant long-term drivers, with near-term production ramps following realistic S-curve timelines and an unwavering focus on safety and execution. Elon’s direct words continue to provide the clearest window into that vision.
For the extremely detailed full transcript (including all speakers, operator notes, and every Q&A), check these reliable sources:
In July 2022, podcaster Johnna Crider invited me, Gail Alfar, to join her for a relaxed, wide-ranging conversation with Elon Musk at Tesla’s Giga Texas factory. The chat was recorded for Johnna’s show Getting Stoned.
The three of us talked about some of the biggest ideas facing humanity: why we should make life multi-planetary with real urgency, the declining birth rate and its risks to civilization, poverty and homelessness, the power of internet access and education, Starlink’s role in disaster relief, Tesla Energy (including Megapacks), and the future of AI and Full Self-Driving.
It was a candid, unscripted discussion full of big-picture thinking and personal stories — including a memorable moment when Elon directly addressed the shadowbanning I was experiencing on Twitter (now X).
This cleaned-up transcript captures the full conversation exactly as it happened — easy to read and understand for anyone, no matter their background. (Elon even invited Johnna back for a Part 2 because we didn’t have time to cover every question!)
Full Verbatim Transcript
Elon: This is Getting Stoned. It’s a podcast about gems and minerals and I am not your host.
Johnna: This is Getting Stoned. It’s a podcast about gems and minerals and I am your host, Johnna Crider. On today’s episode we have a very special guest. Thank you, Elon Musk, for joining me.
Elon: All right.
Johnna: So Elon, I always find it inspiring when you talk about the light of consciousness. What does consciousness mean to you?
Elon: To the best of our knowledge, the only conscious life we’re aware of is on Earth. I’m conscious in the sense that I think I have self-awareness. We’ve never found microbial life anywhere else in the solar system, though it’s possible we might find some under the ice of Europa.
According to the geological record, Earth is about 4.5 billion years old and the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. It’s odd that only very recently has life evolved that can talk, write, and communicate sophisticated ideas. And only now has civilization reached the point where we can send life to another planet. A lot of people think Moon landings are fake. They’re not.
Johnna: I don’t think they’re fake.Yeah, they’ve actually brought back some cool minerals from the Moon and I kind of have one in my collection.
Elon: I actually have a slice of a Moon meteor — a chunk of Moon that was hit by a meteor, smashed a bunch of Moon rocks, and some of the Moon rocks landed on Earth. And I’ve got a segment of one of them.
Johnna Crider: The Apollo mission brought back some Tranquilityite. And up until 2011, it’s called that because of the Sea of Tranquility. Yeah, and there was none found on Earth and then in 2011 some deposits were found in Australia.
So I have a friend of mine sent me some deposits and it broke. And so it had big chunks and two little pieces, so I made the other two little pieces into art.
Elon: But I mean it’s crazy how old the rock is. It’s like billions of years old.
Johnna: That shungite I just gave you, that’s over two billion years old.
Elon: That’s a long time, you know. Don’t hold your breath (laughter)
Elon: I mean it’s hard to even wrap your mind around that kind of time scale. A billion years — our lifespans are a flash in the pan. That’s true. Just like that. Shorter than a flash in the pan compared to galactic time scales.
So there are much things that one could say, or at least appear to be likely, which is that it appears that consciousness is rare. And it takes a long time for it to arise. And so, like I said, to the best of our knowledge we are alone. And so we have to accept the possibility that we may be it — at least in this sector of the galaxy or in the Milky Way perhaps. And if we’re it and this is the only little candle in a vast darkness of a little light of consciousness that got us lit, then we should really try to make sure that life does not go out. And we can’t take it for granted that it won’t. So we want to try to make it last as long as possible.
Elon: And I think we also want to try to understand the nature of the universe, meaning of life, where is it going, what does the future hold, just find out what’s going on in the universe. And so that means the more that we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, the more we’re likely to understand the fundamental questions around the meaning of life and nature of the universe. And so I think that’s a good goal to have. And it’s a goal that I think can unite humanity because it’s a common goal as opposed to sort of infighting and “I want this big field of ice, I want this piece of land.” No, I want this piece of land. Well, you know, there’s a lot of land out there. There’s a lot of planets with nothing on them. How about those ones? Why fight over the little pieces when there’s entire planets out there and solar systems and stuff?
Elon: So I think it is a philosophy that withstands reason. I think there’s a solid reasoning basis for it. It’s really just a philosophy of curiosity, I would call it. And it’s also exciting, you know. If you think like… I mean the happy reasons when you wake up in the morning that you’re excited to be alive and you look forward to the future. And it can’t just be solving one sad problem after another. You know, what the hell’s the point? There’s no point like that.
Johnna: Right.
Elon: This is the first time in history that the window of opportunity has been open for life to become multi-planetary. It may stay open for a long time or a short time, but I think it would be wise to assume it will be open for a short time and take action now.
We don’t need to spend a huge amount of resources on it. Less than one percent of our resources would be enough to make life multi-planetary. We should be life’s steward in that sense, because the other creatures can’t build spaceships but we can.
This isn’t about abandoning Earth. We need to make Earth as good as possible. That’s what Tesla is about, making a good future for Earth. SpaceX is about making life multi-planetary. We need to do both.
Johnna: You would not believe what my cats can do. That’s all I’ve got to say about that! But seriously, I think we have a responsibility to protect the rest of the creatures on Earth too.
Elon: I completely agree. A reasonable approach would be to spend about one percent of our resources on making life multi-planetary and ensuring the long-term survival of consciousness and life as we know it. Tesla’s goal is to help ensure a good future for Earth. SpaceX’s goal is to make life multi-planetary and ensure the long-term survival of consciousness. Those are awesome goals.
Gail: Happiness.
Elon: I’ve mostly talked about the defensive, protective reasons for becoming multi-planetary. But what actually gets me most excited is the sense of adventure and possibility. It would be the greatest adventure ever, exciting and inspiring to see it happen.
Johnna: What you and SpaceX have done in Ukraine with Starlink inspires a lot of deep respect. You also helped Saint Charles Parish in my state after Hurricane Ida, as well as the villages of Tango. What role do you see Starlink playing in disaster relief? We’re going to have a lot of disasters. They’re predicting more hurricanes in my area this year.
Elon: In general, Starlink is not dependent on any ground-based infrastructure, so it can provide internet connectivity to areas hit by floods, fires, or earthquakes where the ground infrastructure has been destroyed. That’s extremely helpful for rescue operations. When people are stranded, they need to be able to say “I need help” or “I need rescue.” Starlink has provided that in a number of situations.
Johnna: When we had Ida, my power was out for a week. Communications in southeast Louisiana were completely wiped out. It just made me think Starlink would definitely help organizations like the Cajun Navy as well as others to communicate better, especially with government.
Elon: Yeah.
Johnna: The Musk Foundation has done a lot of good work. About a month ago I made this really long list of everything you guys are doing. What you did for Lake Charles after Hurricane Laura was phenomenal and saved lives. How do you see the Musk Foundation helping charities, especially toward disaster relief, in the next few years as the effects of climate change continue?
Elon: We try hard with the foundation to give away money in ways that are actually useful. Maximum number of cents on the dollar actually helping people in need. It’s way harder to give away money than you think if you care about it actually doing good. We’re scaling up more personnel in the foundation to go through fewer intermediaries so we can have the shortest path to helping people.
Johnna: Would you consider grants that help organizations that focus on disaster relief?
Elon: Yeah, we do provide grants to organizations that work on disaster relief.
Johnna: Last year you donated 100 million dollars for the XPRIZE competition to fight climate change. Which of the four categories, air, land, ocean, or rocks, do you feel needs the most work?
Elon: The larger problem is getting the parts-per-million level of CO2 in the atmosphere down. We’re going to have to pull it out of the air and store it somewhere. I think storing it in a solid form makes sense. The energy to do that has to come from renewables, solar, wind, geothermal. I’m actually pro-nuclear as well, except in locations prone to natural disasters.
Johnna: There’s a company called Project Vesta that uses peridot to do that, and some diamond companies are making lab-grown diamonds with carbon from the air.
Elon: I don’t think that scales very well, but it is cool to think about.
Johnna: Would you consider doing another XPRIZE when this one closes?
Elon: Yeah, absolutely. We’re constantly looking for highly effective ways to spend money for general social good.
Johnna: What accomplishments of the Musk Foundation are you most proud of?
Elon: We funded a literacy XPRIZE to figure out the best software on a low-cost tablet to teach people to read. If you can improve literacy, you improve everything about a society. That’s probably the best thing we’ve done so far.
Johnna: The declining birth rate. You often talk about this problem. It is a real problem. But there’s another problem I think plays a major role, and that’s poverty. What actions do you think need to be taken toward solving poverty that would help relieve some of that issue with the declining birth rate?
Elon: The declining birth rate is somewhat counter-intuitive, but generally the wealthier someone is, the fewer kids they have. I’m an exception, but it’s quite rare. It’s not really a money thing. In fact, it seems to be the opposite.
Even someone living at what we consider the poverty level in 2022 has access to things the richest person on Earth didn’t have 100 years ago.
Johnna: I’ve been homeless before while working two jobs. The idea of having a kid in that situation would terrify me. You can’t just throw money at it and solve it. There’s a lot of trauma involved. From my own experience, trauma is the number one cause of homelessness. That’s why I was asking what ideas you have that could point toward a real solution.
Elon: Literacy and access to the internet are fundamentally helpful. We have to think beyond just the United States. There are billions of people who have no internet access at all, or it’s very low bandwidth and insanely expensive.
These days you can learn almost anything online. MIT has all their lectures available, and many other universities do the same. You can literally have access to all the world’s information using just a simple phone or an old tablet.
Elon: This fact is really underappreciated. Before the internet, if you wanted to learn a skill you had to go to a specific school, get the exact books, or visit a library that might not even have what you needed. A few hundred years ago books were rare and expensive. The improvement in access to information is truly remarkable.
Johnna: I can’t imagine not having books! Google teaches really well, especially when I go to gem and mineral shows and have to look things up. Do you have any other thoughts on how to reverse population decline?
Elon: The population decline problem is possibly the biggest risk to civilization. A lot of people still think there are too many humans on the planet. That is absolutely not true. We could double the world’s population without any meaningful damage to the environment.
You could fit every single human on Earth inside the city of New York on just one floor. Earth is actually very sparsely populated with humans. There are not enough humans, far from being too many. Last year we had the lowest birth rate in recorded history.
Gail: Wow, yeah. I saw the statistics on your Twitter account.
Johnna: Yeah, so I don’t even see all your tweets half the time, even though I follow you. That’s the crazy part.
Elon: If you have the latest tweets? Because you have to switch because of the algorithm?
Johnna: Yeah, shadow banning is crazy. It’s really bad.
Elon: What the heck’s going on?
Gail: I don’t know. I tweet really nice things but…
Elon: Exactly. You’re not like a hate monger. You’re the furthest thing from it. You’re obviously a super nice person. So what the heck are they doing?
Johnna: She got shadowbanned when she replied to me with a heart. It was you or Kristen. They replied with something really nice and got shadowbanned.
Johnna: Oh, it was you.
Gail: Lots of lots of love.
Johnna: Yeah.
Elon: It really sounds like someone on Twitter is doing something shady. That’s not cool.
Elon: Whoever’s doing that on Twitter, shame on you!
Johnna: Alright, so let’s talk Tesla. There’ve been quite a lot of bills that have been kind of anti-EV or anti-Tesla going through state governments. What are your thoughts on how dealerships are trying to preserve their way of life instead of evolving with the market?
Elon: It’s to be expected that incumbents will oppose a new entrant. If they can’t win a fair fight, they’ll try an unfair fight. But if we have the people on our side and strong customer support, I think we’ll win most of the battles.
Johnna: Tesla Insurance is making a difference for customers who switch, and Louisiana has the highest average cost of car insurance in the nation. When will Tesla Insurance expand to all 50 states and Canada? And when will Louisiana get it?
Elon: Insurance is regulated primarily at the state level, so it’s a state-by-state thing. You have to jump through a lot of hoops in every state, and those hoops take a long time.
Johnna: …and the weakest part of Texas is the grid, and here comes Tesla trying to strengthen that weakest part.
Elon: The batteries are helpful even without sustainable energy because they can load-balance the grid. Power spikes, dips, fluctuations. The batteries can smooth it all out. The Tesla Megapack and Powerwalls can be really helpful for stabilizing the grid.
Gail: Could you talk a little bit about Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) and if Gigafactory Texas could be protected in the event of an emergency?
Elon: In terms of batteries, this is going to be a combination of large utility-scale batteries with very big installations like the one we did with PG&E at Moss Landing, and then at the local level the Powerwalls that collectively can stabilize the grid within a neighborhood. The combination of centralized Megapacks and distributed Powerwalls can have a very positive effect in making sure the power stays on.
Johnna: …and then we also touched upon AI.
Elon: On the AI front, Tesla is doing a lot with AI for Autopilot and Full Self-Driving. We’re making good progress. The goal is to make the car safer than a human driver, and in many situations it’s already safer. There have been cases where the car saved someone’s life because the driver had a seizure or was unconscious and the car pulled over safely.
Autonomy is going to be a huge benefit to society because over a million people die every year in car accidents. I think we can reduce that by at least a factor of 10.
On the broader AI front, we’re working toward artificial general intelligence. AGI. It’s not there yet, but progress is being made. Eventually digital intelligence could exceed human intelligence, and I think we need to be careful because AI could be an existential risk if not handled properly. So some regulatory oversight as a public safety measure makes sense.
But overall, I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to have AI that is beneficial to humanity. Optimus, the humanoid robot, is also powered by the same AI tech. So that’s another big thing.
Johnna: Wow. Well, thank you so much, Elon, for taking the time to talk with me today. I really appreciate it. And thank you to everyone at Giga Texas for making this possible. You’ve inspired so many people. Thank you.
Elon: All right. Thank you.
Johnna: And Elon did invite me to come back since I didn’t get to ask all my questions, so there will eventually be a Part 2. Thank you again.
Gigafactory Texas as seen from the interview conference room. [Credit: Gail Alfar, All Rights Reserved, June 25, 2022]
Tesla continues to impress with its relentless push to expand the Supercharger network across France. The company is delivering fresh convenience and reliability to EV drivers just as vehicle registrations are skyrocketing. New sites and expansions announced via the official @TeslaCharging account on X are popping up near supermarkets, hotels, airports, and major routes. These openings are perfectly timed to support a dramatic comeback in Tesla demand following a tougher 2025. These additions highlight Tesla’s commitment to making long-distance travel seamless in one of Europe’s most promising EV markets.
Latest Superchargers Put Into Service (March–April 2026)
Drawing directly from @TeslaCharging’s recent posts, here’s the latest wave of openings and expansions (listed in reverse chronological order, with nearby landmarks for easy context):
Abbeville (8 stalls) – ~April 12, 2026 Northern commercial hub along the A16, near Hyper U supermarket.
Limoges – Avenue des Casseaux (9 stalls) – ~April 9, 2026 Central France, right beside a Grand Frais supermarket.
Roissy-en-France – Avenue du Bois de la Pie (12 stalls) – ~April 5, 2026 Near Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport and Van der Valk Hotel/Hyatt Place. Ideal for travelers.
Saint-Saturnin (expanded to 48 stalls) – April 3, 2026 Just north of Le Mans at the Brit Hotel. This major upgrade added 28 stalls, complete with solar canopies and restrooms.
Goussainville (9 stalls) and Chilly-Mazarin (10 stalls) – Recent (March/April) Paris suburbs, both anchored near Grand Frais supermarkets.
Le Mans – Rue des Frères Voisin (9 stalls) – March 9, 2026 Urban site in the Le Mans area.
Cholet (8 stalls) – March 6, 2026 Western France retail zone.
Other notable recent additions include Mulhouse (20 stalls), Scionzier (8 stalls), Phalsbourg (8 stalls), and Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire (8 stalls). All are strategically placed for maximum driver convenience.
A clear theme shines through: Tesla is embedding these stations into everyday life by pairing charging with shopping, dining, and rest stops. This approach helps eliminate range anxiety on France’s autoroutes.
Spotlight on the Largest Supercharger Site in France: Saint-Saturnin
Tesla’s network just hit a historic global milestone right here in France, and it is at the country’s current largest Supercharger site. The Saint-Saturnin location just north of Le Mans was expanded to 48 stalls, making it the biggest single-site deployment in France to date.
@TeslaCharging captured the excitement perfectly: “Saint-Saturnin, just north of Le Mans in 🇫🇷, marks our 80,000th Supercharger stall.”
Tesla first began rolling out Superchargers in France more than a decade ago. The company has been steadily building a foundation that is now accelerating rapidly to match surging demand.
Owner Reactions Pour In
French Tesla owners are thrilled with the expansion. One enthusiastic driver shared: “Tesla a le réseau le plus fiable, le moins cher et le plus étendu du monde. d’ailleurs ils ont installés leur 80000eme supercharger à saint saturnin près du mans la semaine dernière 😎.” (Translation: “Tesla has the most reliable, cheapest, and most extensive network in the world. They just installed their 80,000th Supercharger in Saint-Saturnin near Le Mans last week 😎.”)
Tesla a le réseau le plus fiable, le moins cher et le plus étendu du monde. d'ailleurs ils ont installés leur 80000eme supercharger à saint saturnin près du mans la semaine dernière 😎. en heure creuse le prix du kilowatt heure est inférieur au prix EDF pour les particuliers lol.
The timing could not be better. March 2026 saw 9,569 new Tesla registrations, a massive +203 percent year-over-year surge. For Q1 overall (January–March), France recorded a record 13,945 Tesla vehicles, up +108 percent from the same period in 2025.
After a challenging 2025 marked by increased competition, Tesla’s refreshed lineup, competitive pricing, and now-visible charging improvements are clearly paying off.
Projections for the Rest of 2026
With this infrastructure flywheel spinning faster, France looks poised for an outstanding year. If March’s triple-digit growth and Q1 momentum hold, bolstered by dozens more Superchargers expected along key corridors, Tesla could realistically deliver 35,000 to 45,000 registrations in France for full-year 2026. This would be a potential record that significantly boosts its market share in Europe’s second-largest EV nation.
Expect continued focus on high-traffic routes like the A1 and A6, more solar-equipped mega-sites, and even stronger utilization as new Model Y variants and upcoming vehicles hit the roads. The virtuous cycle of better charging plus rising sales is only gaining speed.
Tesla owners in France are living the future today. The network is more robust than ever, and the roads ahead look electric and exciting. Stay tuned as Q2 data rolls in. This story is just getting started!
On October 8, 2003, 32-year-old Elon Musk, gave what is widely regarded as his first documented public talk. He had been invited by Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, organized by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program as part of their e-Corner initiative. At the time, Elon had recently sold PayPal to eBay, SpaceX was barely a year old with roughly 30 employees, and no Falcon rocket had yet flown.
The original recording was split into many short clips on Stanford’s site. In 2013 it was consolidated into a single ~47-minute video on YouTube, and it was uploaded by “Shazmosushi,” which has accumulated approximately only 169,000 views as of April 2026.
This talk remains a quiet historical artifact. It is a raw, unpolished insight from young engineer and business magnet Elon Musk, who was already thinking in decades, not quarters.
We never see the audience in this video, and they must have been amazed to listen to Elon talk in 2003. Little did they know the man standing in front of them would do so much! In the video, Elon wears a black jeans, and a black button up shirt, he’s is classic Elon with a 2003 pager on his waist, and his laptop close at hand. The video image quality is classic 2003, and Stanford’s classic maroon velour curtains serve as the backdrop for this great man.
Elon Musk at 32 presenting at Stanford University – October 2003 Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series – Elon Musk stands at the podium during his rarely seen 2003 Stanford talk. At the time, SpaceX was only one year old and no Falcon rocket had flown yet. Screen grab from the original recording, enhanced for clarity by Grok Imagine.
Elon’s full talk
I’ll try to make this as interesting as possible. If you like space, you’ll like this talk.
My background in brief: I’ll talk a little bit about Zip2 and PayPal, and then mostly about space and what we’re doing in space.
I originally came to California to do energy physics at Stanford. I ended up deferring in 1995 and putting that on hold to start Zip2. In 1995 it wasn’t at all clear that the internet was going to be a big commercial thing. In fact, most of the venture capitalists that I talked to hadn’t even heard of the internet, which sounds bizarre on Sand Hill Road.
I wanted to do something and I thought it would be a pretty huge thing. I thought it was one of those things that only came along once in a very long while. So I got a deferment at Stanford. I thought I’d give it a couple of quarters and if it didn’t work out — which I thought it probably wouldn’t — then I’d come back to school.
When I talked to my professor and told him this, he said, “Well I don’t think you’ll be coming back.” And that was the last conversation I had with him.
There weren’t a lot of ways to get involved with the internet in 1995 that I could think of, other than to start a company, because there weren’t a lot of companies to go and work for apart from Netscape, maybe one or two others.
I didn’t have any money, so I thought we had to make something that was going to return money very quickly. We thought the media industry would need help converting its content from print media to electronic, and they clearly had money. If we could find a way to help them move their media to the internet that would be an obvious way of generating revenue. There was no advertising revenue on the internet at the time.
That was really the basis of Zip2. We ended up building quite a bit of software for the media industry, primarily the print media industry. We had as investors and customers Hearst Corporation, Knight Ridder, and most of the major US print publishers. We built that up and then we had the opportunity to sell to Compaq in early 1999 and basically took that offer. It was for a little over 300 million dollars in cash. And that’s a currency I highly recommend.
After that I wanted to do something more. Post the sale — in fact immediately post the sale — I didn’t really take any time off. I was trying to think of where the opportunities remained on the internet, and it seemed to me that there hadn’t been a lot of innovation in the financial services sector.
When you think about it, money is low bandwidth. You don’t need some sort of big infrastructure improvement to do things with it. It’s really just an entry in a database. The paper form of money is really only a small percentage of all the money that’s out there. So it should lend itself to innovation on the internet.
We thought of a couple of different things we could do. One was to combine all of somebody’s financial services needs into one website so you could have banking, brokerage, insurance and all sorts of things in one place. That was actually quite a difficult problem to solve, but we solved most of the issues associated with that.
Then we had a little feature which took us about a day: the ability to email money from one customer to another. You can type in an email address or actually any unique identifier and transfer funds or conceivably stocks or mutual funds or whatever from one account holder to another. If you try to transfer money to somebody who didn’t have an account in the system it would then forward an email to them saying hey why don’t you sign up and open an account.
Whenever we demonstrated these two sets of features we’d say this was a feature that took us a lot of effort to do and look how you can see your bank statement and your mutual funds and insurance and all that — it’s all on one page and look how convenient that is — and people go “ho hum.” And then we’d say and by the way we have this feature where you can enter somebody’s email address and transfer funds and they go “wow.” So we focused the company’s business on email payments.
In the early going the company was called X.com and then there was another company called Confinity which had actually also started out from a different area. They started off with Palm Pilot cryptography and then they had as a demo application the ability to beam token payments from one Palm Pilot to another by the infrared port. Then they had a website which is called PayPal where you would reconcile the beamed payments. What they found was that the website portion was actually far more interesting to people than the Palm Pilot cryptography was, so they started leaning their business in that direction.
In basically early 2000 X.com acquired Confinity and then about a year later we ended up changing the company’s name to PayPal. And that’s kind of how the approximate evolution of the company went.
And so just about every sector of technology improved. Why has this not improved? So I started looking into that. Initially I thought perhaps it’s a question of funding, and that funding can be garnered by really marshaling public support. So I thought one way to get the public excited about space would be to do maybe a privately funded robotic mission to Mars.
We figured out a mission that would cost about fifteen to twenty million dollars, which isn’t a lot of money, but it’s about a tenth of what a low-cost NASA mission would be. The idea was called Mars Oasis, where we would put a small robotic lander on the surface of Mars with seeds and dehydrated nutrients. They would hydrate upon landing, and you’d have plants growing in Martian radiation and gravity conditions. You’d also be maintaining essentially a life support system on the surface of Mars.
This would be interesting to the public because they tend to respond to precedents and superlatives, and this would be the furthest that life’s ever traveled and the first life on Mars. So pretty significant.
When I started looking at launch vehicles, the lowest-cost vehicle in the US is the Boeing Delta II, which costs about fifty million dollars, and that’s a bit steep for what we were trying to do. So I made three visits to Moscow, to Russia, to look at buying a Russian launch vehicle. It’s actually pretty interesting going to Moscow to negotiate for a refurbished ICBM. On the range of interesting experiences, that’s pretty far out there. We actually did get to a deal, but there were so many complications associated with the deal that I wasn’t comfortable with the risks associated with it.
When I got back from the third trip, I thought, why is it the Russians can build these low-cost launch vehicles? It’s not like we drive Russian cars, fly Russian planes, or have Russian kitchen appliances. When’s the last time you bought something Russian that wasn’t vodka? I think the US is a pretty competitive place and we should be able to build a cost-efficient launch vehicle.
So I put together a feasibility study which consisted of engineers that have been involved with all the major launch vehicle developments over the last three decades. We iterated over a number of Saturdays in the beginning of last year to figure out what would be the smartest way to approach this problem of not just launch cost but also launch reliability. And we came up with a default design.
That actually turned out to be fortunate timing — that feasibility study finished up right around the time that we agreed to sell PayPal to eBay. So coincident with that sale, I moved down to LA where there’s actually the biggest concentration of aerospace industry in the world. It’s actually the biggest industry in southern California, much bigger than entertainment or anything else. I was living in Palo Alto for about nine years before that.
Anyway, so just to talk a little broadly about space and where things are today… Obviously US government manned exploration is not in a great place. We’ve got the three remaining shuttles grounded. It looks like first flight might only be a year from now, if that. And we’ve got a vehicle that is incredibly expensive and really quite dangerous. It’s got a side-mounted crew compartment, so if there’s an explosion, that’s basically instant death. You’ve got solid rocket boosters which once you light them you can’t turn them off. There’s something fundamentally dangerous about pre-mixing your fuel and oxidizer, I think. And then you’ve got wings and control surfaces — when you re-enter you’ve got to maintain a precise angle of attack; even a momentary variance in that can break the whole vehicle apart. And of course it’s got no escape system, so if anything does go wrong, you’re toast.
You’ve got a cost that is really pretty hard to fathom. The shuttle program, when you add up all the pieces, is about four billion a year. And so you can divide four billion by the number of flights and that’ll tell you what the cost is. If there’s say four flights a year, which they haven’t been for a while, then you’re talking about a billion dollars a flight.
The plans for the future are, obviously we’ve got to continue building the space station, so we’re going to keep flying the Shuttle, but I think it’s probably going to be the minimum number of Shuttle flights that we need to launch. The long-term plans are to build something called orbital space plane — or “safe plane” in quotes, because one of the options is a capsule, so it should be called maybe orbital space thing. But the basic idea is to have something that’s hopefully a little cheaper and a lot safer than the Space Shuttle. In particular, it’s going to have an escape system so if something does go wrong, you can abort to safety.
The downside is that it’s still, while it might be a little cheaper, still going to be pretty darn expensive. Estimated cost per flight of the orbital space plane is somewhere in the region of three hundred to four hundred million dollars a flight, and of that amount, two hundred million dollars alone goes to Boeing for the Delta IV Heavy expendable booster. And it’s a fifteen billion dollar development effort expected to be completed in nine or ten years now. Typically things have not been under budget and under time, so it’s unlikely, given historical precedent, that it will stay within fifteen billion dollars and the 2012 timeline.
A bit about what’s going on elsewhere in the world… In Russia, the Soyuz is our only access to the space station. It’s considerably cheaper, considerably safer. The Soyuz has a very good track record. Its crew is top-mounted, it has an escape system, there are no wings or control surfaces to go wrong. Overall, it’s a pretty good system. And the estimated costs are about sixty million dollars a flight, which is an order of magnitude or two less than the Space Shuttle. The thing that constrains them, obviously, is the weakness of the Russian economy. It’s very hard for them to embark on ambitious programs with an economy the size of Belgium.
China is probably the most interesting thing that’s going on in space. This month China is expected to launch their first person into space. They will become only the third country ever to put someone in orbit, and they’ve put a lot of money and effort into this program. If anything serves as a spur for human space exploration, it is likely to be China’s ambitions in space, and hopefully a sense in America that we want to at least keep up with China. And they have grand ambitions beyond just low Earth orbit. They are planning on setting up a space station, putting a base on Mars, and eventually sending humans to Mars.
So what’s happening in the US that I think might ultimately surpass all of that stuff is entrepreneurial space activities, where things are led by small teams of very smart people who are just trying to make things better and cheaper. And that’s what’s exciting.
At this point in the talk (~19:05), Elon Musk discusses early private space companies and specifically highlights Burt Rutan’s work with Scaled Composites.
Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites – White Knight carrier aircraft with SpaceShipOne. Elon Musk discusses this X Prize-winning suborbital project in his 2003 Stanford lecture as an example of early entrepreneurial space efforts.
So in particular, what we’re trying to do at SpaceX is to try to make launch vehicles that are significantly more cost-effective. And the reason that launch costs are so high is not because of physics. The physics of putting something into orbit is not that hard. It’s really just a question of energy. The reason they’re expensive is because of the way that the industry is structured.
So what we’re doing at SpaceX is we have a very small team. I think right now we have about 30 people. And we don’t have any lawyers or accountants or anything like that. We just have engineers and technicians. And we’re trying to do everything in-house as much as possible. So we’re not outsourcing very much. And the idea is to try to simplify the design of the vehicle as much as possible and to use first principles thinking to figure out what the real cost of a launch vehicle should be.
If you look at what it costs to build a rocket, the raw materials — aluminum, titanium, copper, etc. — if you were to buy those materials at market rates and just melt them down, the cost of the materials is actually quite low. It’s on the order of a couple percent of the cost of the launch vehicle. And so the question is, why is everything else so expensive? And the answer is really just overhead and inefficiency in the way things are done. So by simplifying the design and doing vertical integration — basically building almost everything ourselves — we think we can bring the cost down dramatically.
Our first vehicle is called Falcon 1. It’s a small vehicle. It can put about a thousand pounds into low Earth orbit. And the price point we’re targeting is about six million dollars for that. Which is roughly a factor of ten less than what a comparable vehicle would cost today. And we’re trying to get to orbit with that vehicle this year, hopefully. The next step after that would be Falcon 5 and then Falcon 9, which would be able to put much larger payloads into orbit and eventually carry humans.
And the long-term goal is to make life multiplanetary. I think that’s really the most important thing we can do to ensure the long-term survival of humanity. And I think that if we can reduce the cost of getting to orbit by a factor of ten or more, that opens up a lot of possibilities that currently don’t exist.
Elon Musk gesturing while speaking at Stanford – October 8, 2003 – Profile view of Elon Musk passionately explaining his ideas at his first documented public talk at Stanford University in 2003. Just 32 years old, he was already thinking in decades. Original screen grab enhanced for clarity using Grok Imagine.
Q&A portion begins
Audience question: Why is it so expensive to send something into space?
Musk: Well, let me tell you what makes a rocket hard. The energy and the velocity required to get into orbit is so substantial that compared to say a car or even a plane, you have almost no margin to play with. Typically, a launch vehicle will get about two percent of its liftoff mass to orbit. And that’s the case for Falcon as well. So if you can only get two percent of what your rocket weighs to begin with to orbit, you can see that you have to be extremely efficient in every respect. You have to have very high performance engines, very light structures, and you have to be very careful about the margins that you use.
And so that’s why it’s difficult. It’s not that the physics is impossible — it’s just that the margins are so thin that if you make any mistake at all, you don’t make it to orbit. And historically, the aerospace industry has been very risk-averse, which has led to a lot of conservatism in design and a lot of overhead.
Audience question: So how does that compare with PayPal? I mean, PayPal you had to deal with banks and all that kind of stuff, which is also regulated. How is that different?
Musk: Well, with PayPal it was very difficult to get the banks to cooperate. In fact, we had a lot of trouble with that. But ultimately the regulatory environment for financial services is actually pretty friendly compared to aerospace. The aerospace industry is heavily regulated and there are a lot of export controls and ITAR restrictions. So it’s quite a bit more difficult in that respect.
Audience question: What qualities do you look for in an entrepreneur?
Musk: I think the most important thing is to have a very strong sense of what’s important and what’s not important—what’s the real problem that needs to be solved. A lot of people will work on things that are tangential or not really central to the problem. So having a very clear sense of what the key issues are and focusing on those is critical. Also, just a very strong drive and willingness to work extremely hard. Starting a company is not for the faint of heart. It’s very difficult.
Audience question: Can you talk a little bit more about the cost structure and how you’re reducing costs?
Musk: Sure. Our approach is really to make this a solid sound business and so I’ve predicated that the strategic plan on a known market—something that we know for a fact exists—which is the need to put small to medium-sized satellites into orbit. And so that’s what we’re going after initially, and then with that as a kind of a revenue base we will move into the human transportation market. So the long-term aims of the company are definitely human transportation. I think the smart strategy is to first go for cargo delivery, essentially satellite delivery. And our eventual great path is to build the successor to Saturn V—build a super heavy lift vehicle that could be used for setting up a moon base or doing a Mars mission.
But right now we’re focused on Falcon 1 and then Falcon 5 and Falcon 9. And the way we’re reducing costs is really by doing a lot of vertical integration—building almost everything in-house—and simplifying the design as much as possible. We have about 30 people right now, and we don’t have any lawyers or accountants or anything like that. We just have engineers and technicians. And we’re trying to do everything ourselves as much as possible. So we’re not outsourcing very much. And the idea is to try to simplify the design of the vehicle as much as possible and to use first principles thinking to figure out what the real cost of a launch vehicle should be.
If you look at what it costs to build a rocket—the raw materials, aluminum, titanium, copper, etc.—if you were to buy those materials at market rates and just melt them down, the cost of the materials is actually quite low. It’s on the order of a couple percent of the cost of the launch vehicle. And so the question is, why is everything else so expensive? And the answer is really just overhead and inefficiency in the way things are done. So by simplifying the design and doing vertical integration—basically building almost everything ourselves—we think we can bring the cost down dramatically.
We also have a philosophy of making a lot of small innovations rather than trying to do one big innovation. So there are hundreds of small things that we do to reduce cost and improve reliability. We’re also not patenting very much because we think that patents are not that useful in this industry—people just copy them anyway—and it’s better to keep things as trade secrets.
Audience question: What about space mining or solar power satellites?
Musk: I think those are interesting ideas but probably not near-term opportunities. The big opportunity I see is in making life multiplanetary—setting up a base on the Moon and eventually on Mars. That’s really the long-term goal. And to do that we need to reduce the cost of getting to orbit by at least an order of magnitude.
Audience question: What about working with the government? Are there any plans to work with NASA or the military?
Musk: Yeah, we’re actually working with NASA right now on some small contracts, and we’re also talking to the military. The government is a big customer in space, so it makes sense to work with them. But we want to keep our focus on reducing costs dramatically so that we can open up new markets that don’t even exist today.
Audience question: How do you deal with ITAR restrictions? It seems like they prevent you from hiring the best people if they’re not U.S. citizens.
Musk: ITAR is a real pain. It’s one of the biggest challenges we face. We basically can’t hire non-U.S. citizens for a lot of the core engineering work, which limits the talent pool. It’s frustrating because talent is global, but the regulations are very strict. We’re in LA partly because that’s where the biggest aerospace talent pool is in the U.S., so we can find the people we need who are already citizens or green-card holders.
Audience question: Can you talk more about reusability? Is that part of the plan for Falcon?
Musk: Yes, reusability is absolutely critical for the long term. Right now Falcon 1 is expendable, but we’re already thinking about how to make future vehicles reusable. The physics works — it’s just a question of engineering it right. If you can recover and reuse the first stage, that changes the economics completely. It’s one of the biggest levers we have for reducing costs by an order of magnitude or more. We’re not there yet, but it’s definitely on the roadmap.
Audience question: Why do you think making life multiplanetary is so important?
Musk: I think it’s the most important thing we can do to ensure the long-term survival of consciousness and humanity. Right now we’re a single-planet species, and that makes us vulnerable. An asteroid impact, a supervolcano, a nuclear war — any of those could wipe us out. Becoming multiplanetary makes us a spacefaring civilization and greatly increases the probability that consciousness will continue. It’s not about colonizing Mars tomorrow; it’s about laying the foundation so that in the future it becomes possible.
So that’s really the long-term vision for SpaceX. We’re starting small with Falcon 1, but the ultimate goal is to make humanity multiplanetary. I appreciate you all coming out and listening. Thank you very much.
(Applause)
End of the lecture.
Full Verbatim Transcript – Elon Musk’s October 8, 2003 Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture. This transcript has been cross-checked against the video’s auto-generated captions and manually corrected for obvious speech-recognition errors (especially proper names and technical terms).
Elon Musk 2003 Stanford Talk – Passionate moment from his first public speaking appearance- Close-up of 32-year-old Elon Musk as he shares his vision during the 2003 Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders event. A raw, unpolished look at the future founder of SpaceX and Tesla. Enhanced with Grok Imagine for better clarity.Young Elon Musk speaking at Stanford in 2003 – Rare close-up from his first documented public talk- 32-year-old Elon Musk during his October 8, 2003 Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture at Stanford. This historical moment captures Elon shortly after selling PayPal, with SpaceX still in its earliest days. Image enhanced for clarity using Grok Imagine.
In this episode, David Moss joins me inside the car while we drive using Tesla Full Self-Driving (FSD). He shares his firsthand experiences and thoughts after taking multiple unsupervised Robotaxi rides in Austin’s recently expanded service zone.
This is Part 1 of our conversation, with more to come soon. The discussion delivers a real-time, in-car perspective on how Tesla’s autonomous technology is performing in everyday driving conditions across Texas.
Watch the full episode here (or tap the X post for the video):
Ep 165 is here! David Moss is back in town and joins me in the car on FSD for this podcast. He shares his thoughts on his unsupervised Robotaxi rides in Austin’s expanded zone. Part 1 of our conversation drops now, more coming soon pic.twitter.com/iGulQrqVad
These in-car rides and conversations highlight the steady real-world progress Elon and the Tesla team continue to deliver every day as Robotaxi service grows in Austin and beyond.
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What stood out most to you in this episode? Have you taken an unsupervised Robotaxi ride in Austin’s expanded zone yet? Drop your thoughts or share your own Tesla story below.
On March 30, 2026, a SpaceX Falcon 9 first-stage booster completed its 34th successful launch and landing after sending another group of Starlink satellites into orbit. That single-rocket record highlights how far reusable technology has come and how quickly it is making space more accessible than ever before.
The story behind that achievement started with an important advantage. When Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, he brought no formal aerospace engineering background to the project. Instead of seeing that as a gap, Elon turned his outsider perspective into one of the company’s greatest strengths. Free from the usual industry assumptions, he and the early team approached every problem with first-principles thinking, asking the questions others had stopped asking and building from the ground up with fresh ideas.
Elon Musk explains how coming from outside the aerospace industry gave SpaceX the freedom to make radical breakthroughs. “I like I said I read a lot of books.” A reminder that self-learning and questioning assumptions open doors for the next generation. Image credit: Screenshot from Overtime interview
Those fresh eyes proved valuable right away. The first three Falcon 1 launches between 2006 and 2008 did not succeed. Rather than giving up, the team treated each flight as valuable data, made fast adjustments, and kept moving forward. On September 28, 2008, the fourth launch worked perfectly. That commitment to rapid learning turned reusability into reality and cut launch costs by more than 80 percent, opening the door to more frequent and affordable missions.
Elon recently highlighted exactly why that outsider approach mattered. In a 2015 interview he shared again on X, he explained how stepping outside traditional aerospace training allowed the team to challenge old limits. He said, “Indeed, it was because I was not from the aerospace industry that SpaceX made such radical breakthroughs. Same for Tesla. Those in the industry would have if they could have.”
Indeed, it was *because* I was not from the aerospace industry that SpaceX made such radical breakthroughs. Same for Tesla.
Readers on X quickly agreed. People coming from different fields often spot possibilities that those inside the industry have learned to accept as impossible.
For kids today, this record is more than just cool rocket news. It is a clear reminder that you do not need a specific degree or the “perfect” background to help shape the future. Whether you enjoy science class, building projects in your garage, writing code, playing sports, or simply wondering how things work, SpaceX shows what is possible when you stay curious and keep learning from every step. Hard work, smart questions, and the willingness to try again after a setback can open doors that once looked closed.
As Elon said in another interview, “I read a lot of books, talked to a lot of people, and I have a great team”. The path to success is more open than people will often lead you to think.
SpaceX’s latest milestone proves that bold ideas and steady effort turn “impossible” into “already done.” The next breakthrough in AI, energy, medicine, or any field you care about could start with someone exactly like you, someone who chooses to keep asking the questions everyone else stopped asking long ago. The sky is not the limit. It is just the beginning.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster powers skyward with its record 34th launch, carrying Starlink satellites to orbit. This reusability milestone showcases what fresh thinking and rapid iteration can achieve. Photo credit: SpaceX
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